Immigrant Women 

BY 

J. M. CAMPBELL 


Paper read at the New Jersey Conference of Charities and 
Correction, Princeton, N. J., April 3, 1911 





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New York and New Jersey Committee 
North American Civic League for Immigrants 
127 Madison Avenue, New York 




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Immigrant Women 


What Can Be Done to Elevate the Standard of the 

Immigrant Home? 

Prejudice Against Immigrants. 

I doubt whether there is any subject on which prejudice 
is as pronounced as on questions dealing with immigration: 
every one has an opinion and no one is afraid of expressing 
it. The feeling between restrictionists and anti-restriction- 
ists runs so high there seems no possibility of getting the 
advocates of these two camps together on any of the immi¬ 
grant problems actually in our midst. 

I had better at once confess to my own prejudice. I have 
long held out against connecting the immigrant with either 
Charities or Correction, feeling that while immigrants create 
problems calling for protection, assimilation, distribution 
and education, for the present their problem is economic 
and industrial rather than with the dependent or defective 
class. But that you should be willing to discuss the immi¬ 
grant woman, and especially with the idea of raising the 
standard of the immigrant home, encourages me to feel 
that perhaps your charity is of the broader kind,—the 
charity that “suffereth long and is kind,” “believeth all 
things, hopeth all things,”—the charity that “never faileth” 
and that in your consideration of the immigrant women you 
will have faith in the spirit with which they come among us, 
hope in the good that may result from their struggle to 
bring greater opportunities to their families and charity 






4 


toward those who fail in their efforts to rise to the stand¬ 
ards of our complex civilization. 

It may be unnecessary for me to ask this here, but there 
is little doubt that race prejudice is one of our present-day 
evils, the unreasonable prejudice against immigrant people 
amounting almost to a belief that they are different and 
not entitled to the same treatment and consideration we 
accord to our own race, or as sanctioned by the Golden 
Rule. 


Their Good Points. 

Why this should extend to the immigrant woman, I do 
not know,—unless it is that we fear most the things we 
are least able to understand, and we feel there must be 
something peculiar about a woman who, in the spirit of 
the pioneers, blazes her way and settles amongst us, earning 
her living, leading her independent life, asking nothing, 
offering nothing and showing only a stern face, when we 
know that the change in the conditions of living are at 
times almost unbearable, and home-sickness and dis-illusion 
are eating into her very soul. This uncomplaining bravery 
is the stuff that heroes are made of, but the aloofness of 
heroes is sometimes trying to live with, and we distrust 
what we do not understand. Probably the consensus of 
opinion about immigrants is that the men constitute a 
problem, the women are utterly impossible and the only 
hope lies in the coming generation. Yet when we break 
through the barrier of language, we find the woman very 
human and not so different from her American sister of 
immigrant ancestry. She is usually just as devoted a 
mother, having the same pride in, and making just as many 
sacrifices for, her children, from whom she demands perhaps 
more respect than we do, until the spirit of American inde- 



5 


pendence ingulfs the family and the parents have to suc¬ 
cumb before the children’s ready mastery of the language, 
their wage-earning power and more speedy introduction to 
the customs of the country. The unmarried women are 
just as fond of social contact and eager to meet their kind 
as the rest of us: they have the same feminine fondness for 
dress, even if their taste runs to an over-abundance of petti¬ 
coats, instead of a lack of them, and a gay head-handker¬ 
chief rather than the Paris head-dress, expensive out of all 
proportion to its value, coveted by their American sisters. 

Where they exceed us in virtue is perhaps in their friendly 
kindness, their readiness not only to divide, but to give up 
for their less fortunate neighbors; to share their food, 
clothing and shelter and do it with such tact that the sting 
of accepting help is taken away. And how quickly they 
forget what they have done! I recall an instance where a 
nine weeks’ old infant was left on my hands after nine 
o’clock at night by a Polish man whose wife had died leav¬ 
ing three children under four years of age. On his return 
from work that day his landlady told him she could not keep 
the baby any longer—it cried too much, so he started out 
with it after supper and had failed to find a relative or 
friend in a position to care for it. When it was forced 
upon me, I telephoned to two hospitals, a day nursery and an 
orphan asylum, only to find them all profuse in apologies 
and promises, but unequal to the emergency. In despair 
I turned to a widow with four young children who promptly 
laid her own baby across the foot of the bed in order that 
she might make room for the little stranger on her pillow, 
and when a few days later I tried to thank her for her care 
she silenced me with the remark—“Who could shut the door 
on such a little shrimp as that?”—and absolutely refused 
to take one cent for her trouble, though I knew she was 
struggling with a burden of unpaid rent. What the immi- 


6 


grant women lack in social usage and American habits of 
living is more than made up by their more trusting faith 
and perhaps a finer spiritual grain which must be behind 
their unquestioning acceptance of the hard conditions cir¬ 
cumstances force upon them and their readiness to overlook 
the many injustices of which they are so often the victims. 

While I know these people often sin from weakness, 
passion or ignorance, it is seldom from hardness of heart 
and I do not think we can expect to gain their confidence 
or assistance until we have learned to admire their evident 
virtues; their uncomplaining bravery, their adaptability, 
their respect for authority, their eagerness to learn and 
ambition for their children, as well as their abiding faith in 
American ideals, all of which should command our greatest 
respect. 


What They Need. 

The immigrant woman comes to us usually creating the 
same problems that the immigrant man does, for these 
people are strangers and must find a home: they are seeking 
a livelihood and must find work; they are ignorant, so need 
protection and education, but the problem becomes more 
complicated by the additional question of sex and morality: 
and our responsibility becomes greater, for when the immi¬ 
grant woman comes here, she is apt to remain and is the 
founder of the home of our future American citizens. On 
the immigrant family the economic pressure bears the 
hardest. They must accept the lowest wages being ignorant 
and unable to cope with an industrial system which, trading 
on their ignorance of conditions and the standards of living 
here, withholds from them the reward to which their labor 
entitles them. They must buy in the smallest quantities and 
at the highest prices and meet the deficit by home work, 


7 


child labor and over-crowding at the peril of health, virtue 
and life. But it will not do for us to be unmindful of the 
fact that the diseases bred of poverty, vice and sickness are 
just as contagious to the native American as to our foreign- 
born residents. In considering what New Jersey can do 
to raise the standard of the immigrant home, I think we had 
better begin with the advice given for making hare soup— 
“First catch your hare.” See first that they have “homes” 
to live in. When you find twenty-four families living in a 
twenty-four roomed shack, in your agricultural sections, 
lacking every facility for cleanliness and comfort, as it is 
only to be used during certain seasons of the year: or seven¬ 
teen women boarding in a four-roomed flat in the heart of 
the tenement section in one of your smaller cities, the only 
facilities for washing being the kitchen sink, the wonder 
is that they can be even presentably clean. Picture to your¬ 
selves what you would do if you had to share a sleeping 
room, and a small room at that, with four other women; 
or the four rooms with sixteen other women and had to 
buy your own provisions and cook them on a common 
stove after having worked on your feet all day in the noise 
of the machinery of a textile mill with never a minute’s 
privacy anywhere. Yet I never saw a more kindly lot of 
girls, those earning seven and eight dollars a week, caring, 
as a matter of course, for the newcomer who as an appren¬ 
tice earned nothing at all. They had all come from the 
same village: sixteen families (for no two girls had the 
same surname) had seen their young daughter,—they 
ranged in age from seventeen to tweny-four,—launch out 
for a strange country, and face unknown dangers, lured 
by the hope of earning from $3.00 to $7.00 a week. But 
the home-sickness was shown by the eagerness with which 
they drew forth from a trunk,—which also revealed clothing, 
boots, a large loaf of dark bread, cheese and bologna,—a 


8 


colored postcard of a tiny village surrounded by poppv- 
crowded wheat fields with the Tatra mountains in the back¬ 
ground, which they showed with evident pride as their home 
in the old country. 

Will you tell me how we can expect decent living con¬ 
ditions when a four-room apartment, even though it 
does conform to the latest tenement-house laws, contains 
six males and nine females, consisting of three mar¬ 
ried couples, four single women, two single men and 
three children under four, all to be accommodated in four 
rooms? It is a travesty to call such places homes, and I 
could go on multiplying similar examples indefinitely. To 
my mind, until New Jersey sees to it that such conditions 
are not allowed to exist, we cannot look to the immigrant 
women for miracles. I know it may work hardship on the 
immigrant laborer, where inadequate wages make lodgers the 
only solution of the problem of living, but if you want 
better standards you will have to see that your manufac¬ 
turers pay decent wages —fight for a moral minimum 
wage—or make up your minds to raise your tax rate and 
support in your charitable institutions some of those who 
must go to the wall if such conditions are broken up. 
Many immigrants are living at a lower standard here than 
they did in their own country. Congestion easily creeps in, 
but is hard to root out and calls for eternal vigilance. 
You need more tenement and sanitary inspectors: if your 
local board of health cannot get the appropriation to secure 
them, get your women’s clubs and church societies to sup¬ 
port preferably women inspectors and let them work under 
and report to the local board of health; they are just as 
necessary as missionaries to the heathen. A sympathetic 
woman inspector could work wonders in showing tenement 
people how to adjust themselves: let them explain the rela¬ 
tion of landlords to tenants, and in telling that the law conv 



9 


pels landlords to provide light rooms and outside windows, 
it is an easy matter to add that tenants have duties and 
should not use their air-shafts as their dumping ground, or 
the hath-tubs, if they are fortunate enough to have them, 
as coal bins. A knowledge of their rights under the law 
would soon put an end to the fear of reporting necessary 
repairs in case the rent will be raised. I have in mind a 
case where fourteen families were without running water 
for three weeks one winter because every one was afraid 
to report that the pipes had “bust.” 

Get visiting nurses among your people, they are the 
workers of miracles in raising standards and improving 
conditions. The immigrant is suspicious of hospitals and 
seldom has the cash to pay doctor’s fees, so when sickness 
comes the advice of neighbors and mid-wives is readily fol¬ 
lowed often with disastrous results. I knew of a case 
where an infant’s head was treated for eczema with ink 
which caused erysipelas and the child died within twenty- 
four hours. On trying to find out why the people thought 
ink would cure the disease, I learned that in Hungary the 
peasants make their own ink from sloe berries, which may 
have some healing properties. It is not easy to change the 
traditions of a race and it may take more than one visit to 
convince a woman that it is quite unnecessary in this clim¬ 
ate to tie up her baby’s head in a handkerchief, especially 
if she has no clothing on the rest of its body; or that coffee 
and beer are hardly as nutritious for young children as milk, 
but the right sort of nurse will win out every time and her 
only rival is the kindergartner, who in bringing out her 
baby’s accomplishments usually wins the heart of the mother 
though they may not have a word in common. 

I do not think immigrant women respond very readily to 
“absent treatment” and if you think their methods of pre¬ 
paring food might be improved upon, you will have to go 


10 


among them and run your cooking classes in their society 
halls and lodges: they will hardly attend classes in schools, 
except probably the young girls, but the reception received 
at their societies is so cordial one’s head is apt to be turned; 
the gratitude and deference shown being all out of propor¬ 
tion to the effort made to assist them. We are missing an 
enormous power if we do not work in connection with the 
foreign societies which control the different nationalities in 
all our communities. 

Labor. 

In entering the labor field, the immigrant woman is handi¬ 
capped from the fact that for domestic service, where the 
demand exceeds the supply, the point of contact must come 
through the employment agency which is the chief training 
school and distributing point for thousands of immigrant 
women every year. Here is where they get their instruc¬ 
tion as to what will be expected of them and also what they 
must demand: here it is that they are most frequently 
exploited. Your New Jersey Employment Agency law is 
good, but it is your responsibility to see that it is properly 
enforced. I do not think there is any corruption in the 
case of the officials charged with enforcing the laws, only 
laxity which has resulted in a low moral tone in addition 
to the evasions of the law. In one of your towns contain¬ 
ing twenty-five agencies, twenty-three licensed and two un¬ 
licensed, every one of them were found breaking the law 
in some particular and seven of them considered propositions 
to supply help for a disorderly house. In another New 
Jersey town one agency is breaking the law on sixteen dif¬ 
ferent counts. This is your responsibility: in her ignorance 
the immigrant woman is helpless against exploitation, but 
the treatment received in these places often changes their 
idea of what constitutes justice in America. 


II 


Domestic employment does not prove the realization of the 
immigrant woman’s dream. She has come here to work for 
higher wages, a home and greater freedom, and when the 
difficulties which must arise when two civilizations meet in 
daily contact under one roof, when on one side there is 
difference of language, religion, past experience and the 
dread of being homeless if discharged at an hour’s notice; 
and on the other little sympathy, advanced standards and 
a lack of democratic spirit, it is little wonder that the immi¬ 
grant woman soon deserts for the shop, or factory. There 
she is sure to get better hours, more definite duties, no social 
isolation and less pronounced discrimination, which more 
than makes up for the better living conditions of domestic 
service which might be of the greatest value in American¬ 
izing immigrant women. Employers should realize that 
they are working with human beings, not machines, and 
accord them treatment which will tend to elevate the scale 
of human progress and friendliness. 

In the shop and factory again the woman is at a dis¬ 
advantage for the barrier of language and lack of previous 
training which might produce a leader prevents co-operation 
for mutual support to a greater extent than even among 
immigrant men, and when cuts in wages and hours are 
made in dull seasons, the immigrant woman is apt to be the 
first victim. Scale of wages paid to immigrant women is 
too complicated a matter to discuss, but if, as has been so 
clearly put by Mr. Brandeis in his brief on the Oregon ten- 
hour case, which has since been confirmed by the United 
States Supreme Court—“The very existence of the State 
depends on the character of its citizens, therefore if indus¬ 
trial conditions are forcing the workers below the standard 
of decency, it becomes possible to deduct the right of State 
regulation,” and that the immigrant woman may not become 
your wards for either charity or correction it may be neces- 


12 


sary for you to invoke State aid to secure a minimum wage 
law. When you find that the combined wages for a house¬ 
hold of sixteen women one week last summer was $48, an 
average of $3 apiece to cover all their expenses—and the 
fact that it is the dull season in the factory does not obviate 
the necessity for food and shelter—and when you add to the 
scant food and crowded quarters the trying heat, bringing 
depleted will-power, is it not a wonder that these young 
women have not already been lured from the path of 
virtue? 

Probably the hardest lot the immigrant woman has to 
face in this country is when she has to labor in the agricul¬ 
tural sections and canneries, adding to her own labor that of 
her children, with the worst possible housing conditions and 
so little opportunity to care for her family: conditions which 
are a blight upon our civilization and which we would 
deplore in Europe, but are entirely oblivious to in our own 
State. We cannot build up a sound citizenship until workers 
are protected in the industries which require their labor, 
and State supervision may be just as necessary in the agri¬ 
cultural fields, canneries, labor camps and small communities 
as for the city factories. 


Protection. 

At many points the immigrant woman needs our pro¬ 
tection equally with the immigrant man, as for instance, 
in the courts, where the immigrant’s only chance of justice 
depends on the services of an interpreter, in many places 
strangely lacking: in the supervision of the immigrant 
banks to which they commit their savings: in protection at 
the docks and stations from those who would take advantage 
of their lack of knowledge of the language, our currency, 
the distances and models of travel, to fleece them of the few 


i3 


dollars they must possess to enter the country, which is 
often their whole capital with which to start life in a strange 
land, and at the hands of shyster lawyers, notaries, matri¬ 
monial agencies, and from fake advertisements of doctors, 
etc. But there is one place where the danger is greatest to 
the woman. This is in connection with recreation. The 
immigrant races coming to us now are the pleasure-loving 
people from the south of Europe, accustomed to find their 
amusement out-of-doors in their own country, where the 
village green is the social centre and parades and dances 
their expression of enjoyment. Here, where the industrial 
pressure is so great that the need for diversion is greater, 
we drive immigrant women to dance halls connected with 
saloons, which in exchange for their amusement they are 
bound to patronize, and then deplore the fact that the 
servants go to balls and return to your homes at dawn, dead 
drunk! These places are usually fire-traps and are the 
haunts of every variety of unscrupulous villain. I remem¬ 
ber on one occasion being with a young Russian looking on 
at the gay crowd in one of your dance-halls, when he turned 
to me and said, “It is hard to realize that these places are 
really the entrance to hell, and if a girl slips here her way 
is greased all the way down.” We cannot choke the natural 
love of pleasure, or the necessity for relaxation, but we can 
see that decent places of amusement are provided—that our 
parks contain dance pavilions open to immigrants where 
they may give expression to a pleasure as beautiful as it is 
innocent under proper conditions. Visit the dance halls in 
the immigrant sections of your own cities—see the attrac¬ 
tions the beer gardens ofifer—then read what Chicago ha? 
done in providing recreation centres in the parks and play¬ 
grounds. I have too much faith in New Jersey to believe 
you will be satisfied to let things remain as they are in the 
majority of your towns to-day. 


A 


14 


Education. 

Perhaps the most difficult problem with the immigrant 
woman is to make her appreciate the advantages of educa¬ 
tion, which to her is something only for the men and chil¬ 
dren. Her lot in life has always been the dull routine of 
manual work and the raising of many children and it is 
hard to make her understand that apart from the book 
learning, of which she is very suspicious, education might 
mean methods of making her work easier, or giving her 
children better care. While these women appreciate that a 
knowledge of English will be an advantage, the majority 
cannot be persuaded to attend night schools. I think sewing 
classes and even cooking might be offered as a bait, but the 
immigrant woman is not apt to remain in school unless she 
is met by some one who speaks her own language. 

There is one point on which I think we are sadly remiss 
in regard to immigrants and that is in not advertising the 
existing agencies of relief which as indirect taxpayers they 
are in a measure supporting. 

I took occasion last summer to ask every person in four 
houses, one on each of four parallel streets in one of your 
small New Jersey towns, what provision they had against 
the day of sickness or accident, which is sure to come to us 
all, and whether they knew of the departments to which 
they could apply for help? Of the 188 people in these four 
houses—and you would hardly consider them tenements— 
(one was a single flat over a store) ; 

119 had no knowledge of the city physician; 

155 had no knowledge of the visiting nurse; 

145 had no knowledge of the poor master; 

And 119 had no knowledge of the day nursery. 

The two hospitals in the town had been well advertised, 
for only 15 out of the 188 had not heard of these. The 


majority of these people had no money in reserve; carried 
no life insurance or sick benefit, and when they did it was 
usually the children who were protected rather than the 
wage earner. An amusing instance, if it had not been 
pathetic, was a case of a Syrian family, who knew nothing 
of any of the existing relief agencies, who had no money 
in reserve in this country nor any life insurance or sick 
benefit, but were depositing money in a bank in Syria, were 
sending over payments for life insurance and sick benefit 
and at that very moment an old woman was tottering on 
the brink of her grave and being doctored with a concoction 
of herbs, which if as deadly as evil-smelling, meant funeral 
expenses long before money or any assistance could be 
gotten from Syria to help to meet them. 

A simple statement of the relief agencies and of the laws 
concerning the conditions of life in your own communities, 
printed in the languages of your immigrant population 
would do a great deal to dispel the present ignorance of 
our customs, which is doubtless at the bottom of the 
prejudice against immigrant people. 

For the immigrant woman I can only bespeak your assist¬ 
ance and protection so that the spirit of freedom and justice 
on which your constitution is founded shall be her inherit¬ 
ance and that her faith in American ideals shall not be 
shattered. 










BROOKLYN EAGLE PRESS. 


